Unless otherwise indicated herein, the approaches described in this section are not prior art to the claims in this application and are not admitted to be prior art by inclusion in this section.
As the complexity and energy efficiency requirements of various types of electronic devices increases due to regulatory requirements and consumer demands, conventional electronic power switches have remained markedly unchanged. For expensive, high-end electronic components that require complex and specific power switching with skew rate control, intricate sequencing and output monitoring, where cost is no object and space restrictions may be a secondary, if not tertiary, concern, various customized systems that utilize expensive and large custom components exist. FIG. 1 shows a block diagram of a conventional notebook computer power architecture.
As shown, such power architectures include a large bill of materials, which more often than not associate with significant cost. Not only is there a need in such power management systems for many low-dropout regulators (LDOs), but also many other disparate power integrated circuits (ICs) such as the CPU regulator, the dual chipset regulator, dual DDR regulator, etc. Because of the complexity and number of power management ICs required, such systems require external microcontrollers or software to control the system using many general-purpose input/out (GPIO) pins and printed circuit board (PCB) traces, all of which contribute to an increased footprint size for the PCB and, ultimately, the device that includes the power managements system.